Hey guys,
In an attempt to try and do something constructive for the community I
looked into installing Radiant on the free Heroku account ("Blossom" + 1
dyno = $0 -- sweet).
The results and ease of deployment were surprising. For the test I used
the "roasters" bootstrap site that comes with Radiant. Check it out:
http://young-fog-92.heroku.com/
Have a play with the admin interface:
http://young-fog-92.heroku.com/admin
user: oneclick
pass: oneclick
To me, seeing as it is running on a completely free account, that site
is working pretty nicely.
I followed these instructions to get it up and running:
http://tr.im/mDSb
There were a few hiccups along the way which, thankfully, were fixable.
The Heroku guys are putting some effort into Windows compatibility for
their client gems, although there are a few glitches still. See here
(and my comment on there):
http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/?p=92
Overall, the fact that you can get a Rack-based app up and running
quickly, easily and for free on Heroku without all of the hassles of
servers and suchlike is *huge*. Part of what made PHP so massive was
that drag-and-drop ease of deployment.
Then there's the fact that you don't have to freeze gems into your app;
you just supply a .gems manifest instead and the gems get installed for
you natively. For my test push of Radiant, this worked flawlessly.
http://docs.heroku.com/gems
So all of this goodness combines to make an experience that would be
really appealing to Windows-based Rubyists. Install Ruby with the OCI,
then have an app deployed and running in the net in minutes. That's a
pretty cool experience to be offering potential Ruby users.
So that's why I think some sort of sponsorship from Heroku would be a
perfect match.
Should I ask them if they're interested?
Charles